“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Questions
- What characteristics distinguish Romanesque architecture?
- What characteristics distinguish Gothic architecture?
- What characteristics define medieval urbanism?
- How were the cathedrals built, and who built them? What was the basic system of labor organization?
- How did the Catholic Church take the place of the Roman Empire after its fall?
- What does the Church of Saint Donatus in Zadar show about how medieval builders reused Roman ruins?
- Why do some Romanesque churches have sexual carvings?
European Middle Ages
Pre-Romanesque
The Roman Empire converts into the Catholic Church
The Western Roman Empire did not so much perish as slowly change its shape. When imperial authority disintegrated in the fifth century, many people found themselves in a landscape of uncertainty and loss, and it was the Church —already structured like a small empire— that stepped in to supply continuity, connection, and an appearance of stability. In effect, it took over what the state could no longer hold together, much as the end of the British Empire opened the way for today’s Global Financial system to redesign how societies understand and accommodate power.
Thomas Hobbes put it sharply in the 17th century: the papacy is the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, sitting crowned on its grave. Christianity moved from persecuted sect to imperial favorite under Constantine (313), then to official state religion under Theodosius (380). In the process, it quietly inherited Roman structures: dioceses mapped onto the empire’s administrative grid, bishops behaving like provincial governors, Latin as the working language, Roman law as the template for canon law, and even the ancient title Pontifex Maximus, eventually pinned to the pope.
When Romulus Augustulus, a 16‑year‑old Western emperor more mascot than monarch, was deposed in 476 and the so‑called barbarian kingdoms took over, bishops were often the only figures left with any real authority, organization, or legitimacy in the cities. They arranged food supplies, bargained with invading armies, and oversaw local justice. Pope Leo I’s confrontation with Attila and Gregory the Great’s management of Rome’s grain and defenses are the stock examples. Monasteries quietly sustained literate culture by copying the texts that happened to survive. Rome, both as a place and as an idea, remained central, but now as the pope’s city rather than the emperor’s. That shift of power was shored up by convenient forgeries like the Donation of Constantine and consecrated in 800, when a pope placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head, making the Church the institution that could now dispense Roman legitimacy.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the Roman Empire outlasted its western half by a millennium under the name of Byzantium. The Church, for its part, did not simply inherit the empire so much as refashion it, overlaying imperial structures with new theology, monastic ideals, and its own intricate power struggles. Many historians, taking their cue from Peter Brown, now describe this era as a slow reworking of the late antique world rather than a theatrical collapse and succession. Gibbon, however, insisted on the more familiar drama, arguing that Christianity undermined Rome instead of preserving its legacy.
Stones with Second Lives
In the ninth century, Bishop Donatus of Zadar raised a circular church on the ruins of an older empire. Its columns, altars, and carved stones were stripped from the Roman forum below, so a Christian sanctuary quite literally stands on Rome, long after its builders had ceased to depend on Rome itself. Civilizations tend to proceed this way: the defeated are not wiped out but repurposed, and the church now bears the bishop’s name, not those of the nameless laborers who dragged the marble into place. We call this heritage, though it is also a refined kind of scavenging. The stones were simply transferred from one god to another, and stones, unlike people, are never invited to object.
Far to the west, in the Valdivielso valley of Burgos, San Pedro de Tejada tells another story: what power leaves behind when it has moved on. There is no forum here, no imperial ruins recycled into new monuments. There is a twelfth‑century Romanesque church in the middle of the countryside, raised for a community that would never enter the chronicles of kings. Yet it is in these marginal places that the Middle Ages stops being a fable of knights and cathedrals and appears as it was: peasants and priests, harvests and stonemasons who understood far more about their world than the surviving documents are willing to concede.
The most striking case is in Cantabria, at the Colegiata de San Pedro de Cervatos, begun in 1129 and still being reworked around 1500. Anyone who thinks the medieval church was a machine for chastity need only look up at its corbels and capitals, where bodies present themselves with a frankness that would make a modern censor blush. Sex is literally carved into the walls of the sacred. Who authorized it? The same institution that thundered against the flesh paid to have the flesh chiseled in stone. Either the masons quietly inserted their own view of humanity into the sanctuary, or the Middle Ages were less prudish than the centuries that later denounced them. Perhaps both.
The explicit sexual imagery displayed on many Romanesque churches—penises, vulvas, intercourse, childbirth, and other sexual acts—should not be dismissed as mere erotic flourish or crude ornament, but understood as part of the political and social vocabulary of the medieval nobility: aristocratic patrons mobilized sexuality and reproduction to proclaim their lineage, fertility, and hereditary claim to power, while aristocratic women, for their part, figured prominently as patrons of churches that functioned as dynastic monuments. By the 13th century, however, the Gregorian reform within the Church was promoting clerical celibacy and a far more restrictive sexual morality, as if embarrassed by the visual rhetoric previously carved in stone.
These three buildings, scattered across thousands of kilometers, tell a single story. A church is never only a church. It is an archive of what was taken, what was permitted, and what slipped past the censor. History records the bishop who signed and the king who commanded. The stone, carved by hands no one bothered to name, remembers the rest.
Donatus of Zadar / Saint Donatus Church, Zadar, Croacia, IX ** ,
San Pedro de Tejada **,
Colegiata de San Pedro de Cervatos (1129-1500) ** , **,
Romanesque (Románico)
Romanesque architecture, the quintessential medieval European style from the 10th to the 12th centuries, is recognizable at once by its thick walls, rounded arches, heavy piers, barrel and groin vaults, tiny windows, and almost militarized, fortress-like massing. Drawing deliberately on Roman and early Christian models, it presents itself as the orderly bridge to the Gothic—an era that, for all its claims to transcendence, still trusted stone more than light.
More examples
Church of Saint-Étienne (Nevers),1063, Plan, Plan II, **
Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (1075-1210; Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque) Camino de Santiago / Way of St James
Basilica of Saint Sernin, Toulouse / Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, 1050-1180.
Structural system of Romanesque churches ** / buttresses (backstay) **
Collegium/corpus/guilds/unions/universities
Light and Shadows: History and Architecture of the Gothic Age
Notre-Dame de Paris (1160–1345) stands among the earliest monumental Gothic cathedrals and helped make the flying buttress standard rather than scandalous. These external supports shifted the weight of the vaults outward, allowing the walls to climb higher and thin out for enormous rose windows that preached in colored light what the clergy explained in words. After a fire in April 2019 destroyed its roof and 19th-century spire, the monument was rebuilt by hundreds of craftsmen who deliberately revived many medieval techniques, as if the best answer to a modern disaster were to return, tool in hand, to the 13th century; it reopened in December 2024. Nearby, the Sainte-Chapelle (1238-48), erected by King Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns and other relics, pushes the Gothic logic almost to breaking point: in its upper chapel, the walls nearly vanish, replaced by soaring stained-glass windows that turn the space into a fragile casket of colored light and royal ambition. The Cathedral of Reims, begun in 1211, served for centuries as the stage where French kings were anointed; its façade is blanketed with hundreds of sculptures, including the carefully enigmatic «Smiling Angel.» It was badly damaged by German shelling in World War I and subsequently restored, a reminder that even sacred theater depends on secular artillery. The Cathedral of Chartres, rebuilt in haste after a fire in 1194, has kept most of its original stained glass—celebrated for its saturated «Chartres blue»—as well as a labyrinth in the pavement and two mismatched spires, one Romanesque and one later Gothic, that freeze the transition between the styles in stone, as if architectural history needed a before-and-after picture.
Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris / Notre Dame 1160-1345. NYT report on Notre-Dame.
Sainte-Chapelle / Holy Chapel (1238-48) **
Cathedral of Reims **
Cathedral of Chartres
Other examples
Cathedral of Amiens
Cathedral of 1260, **
Abbey of Westminster 1245
Architectures of Form and Fragment
Gothic churches did not reject the past so much as rearrange it. Their ground plan still followed the Romanesque model: a (1) Latin cross with a (2) long nave, (3) side aisles, a (4) transept, and an (5) apse, often ringed by an (6) ambulatory and (7) radiating chapels for pilgrims. Most of the key features were also inherited. The (8) pointed arch was long used in Islamic architecture and appears in Romanesque buildings such as Cluny, and ribbed vaults were already present in late Romanesque churches like Durham Cathedral.
What changed, beginning with Abbot Suger’s choir at Saint-Denis in the 1140s, was the decision to fuse the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and—soon after—the flying buttress into a single skeletal framework. Instead of relying on thick, continuous walls as Romanesque churches did, this system funneled the weight of the vaults down the ribs to slender piers and out to external buttresses. Freed from the burden of support, the walls could soar higher and be cut open for vast stained-glass and rose windows. The outcome was an interior that seemed improbably tall, luminous, and almost dematerialized, set against the heavy, dim, fortress-like spaces of Romanesque churches. For the patrons and theologians who paid for this miracle of engineering, the new light conveniently signified divine presence as well.
The structural system of the Gothic cathedrals (formworks, wood underpinnings) **
Architectural elements
Gargoyle, Freiburg Minster, Roseton / rose window, etc. Stained glass ** (vitreaux)
Thesis on sexual images in the Romanesque churches **
The iconography of archivolt and eardrums
Stone Thrones of the Medieval World
Before castles rose over the countryside, political power in Europe rested in cities, royal courts, and chieftains’ halls rather than in private fortresses. In the Roman Empire, authority radiated from urban centers, where governors, courts, and bureaucracies operated, while the rural world was supervised from large, open, and unfortified villas. After the Western Empire collapsed in the 5th century, many Roman cities withered, but bishops often stepped into the void; the cathedral and the bishop’s residence quietly became the new hubs of local rule. The emerging Germanic dynasties, such as the Merovingians and later the Carolingians, usually governed from rural estates and palaces (palatia), traveling with their entourages from one residence to another, since power still depended heavily on the ruler’s physical presence. Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen is the most famous case of this wandering kingship pretending to settle down. In northern Europe, especially in Anglo-Saxon England, authority coalesced around the lord’s great timber hall, where he feasted, rewarded warriors, and judged disputes—like Heorot in Beowulf. Defense at this stage was more communal than private: old Roman walls were patched up, and people organized fortified towns, such as the Anglo-Saxon burhs of Alfred the Great.
The spread of castles marked a decisive shift as power drifted away from public institutions and royal courts toward thousands of private lords, each ruling a modest territory from his own fortified dwelling.
Castles appeared in Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries, as the Carolingian Empire splintered and Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raids pushed local elites to defend themselves. The earliest versions were simple motte-and-bailey complexes: a wooden tower on an earthen mound above a fenced enclosure. From the 11th century onward, especially after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, many were rebuilt in stone around a central keep (donjon), encircled by curtain walls with towers, battlements, arrow slits, a moat, a drawbridge, a portcullis, and a heavily defended gatehouse. Later, under the influence of Crusader warfare, some became concentric fortresses, with one belt of walls nested inside another.
A castle, however, was more than a military structure. It functioned as the lord’s residence and as the nerve center of feudal authority, where rents were collected, harvests stored, and justice administered. Almost every castle contained (1) a chapel, and the lord’s power was presented as part of a divinely ordained order. Castles also served as (2) prisons, often in towers or underground chambers, holding both local offenders and captured nobles kept for ransom. Ordinary people could not enter freely, yet peasants regularly came to pay dues, perform labor and services, or appear before (3) the lord’s court. In wartime they might crowd into the outer bailey with their families and animals. The walls were designed to keep out invaders and rival lords, but they also worked quite effectively to discipline the surrounding population. The Normans raised castles to overawe conquered England, just as Edward I later did in Wales, and when peasants revolted, as in the French Jacquerie of 1358, they headed for the houses of their social superiors (such as in the The Three Little Pigs fable). Inside these imposing shells, there were no modern comforts. (4) Latrines took the form of garderobes—small wall projections from which waste fell into a pit or the moat—and (5) bathing meant sitting in a wooden tub filled with water heated in the kitchen. Daily life revolved around the great hall, where people ate, worked, and often slept together. Only the lord’s family occupied a private chamber, and even that was usually cramped and dim, with a hearth, shutters, and few glass panes. From the 15th century onward, gunpowder artillery made high stone walls increasingly pointless, and many castles slid into new roles as decorative palaces—or simply crumbled into ruins.
Mont-Saint-Michel, XI
Eltz castle
Windsor Castle, 11th century. ** , floor plant **
Bodiam Castle, East Sussex **, 1385, Planta/Plano/ floor plant **
Castle Alcazar of Segovia, S XII **
Medieval castle toilet **
Medieval Cities
European cities reemerged between the 11th and 13th centuries, driven by improved agriculture, population growth, and expanding trade that finally produced something rare: a surplus. Some rose again on the bones of Roman settlements, like Paris and London; others gathered almost accidentally around a castle, a monastery, a bridge, a port, or a makeshift market that refused to disappear. Many secured charters from kings or lords, granting townspeople specific legal privileges, neatly captured in the German saying “city air makes you free”: a serf who managed to reside in a town for a year and a day could leave feudal bondage behind. Viewed from above, most medieval cities reveal not careful planning but gradual improvisation—an irregular, organic layout of cramped, twisting streets converging on the cathedral and the market square, all wrapped in defensive walls with gates where tolls were taken and doors shut at night. With space inside the walls scarce and expensive, houses grew tall and narrow, pressed close together, their upper stories jutting out over the street, as if trying to escape the ground. There were exceptions, notably the planned “bastide” towns of southern France, laid out on a regular grid that advertised order if not equality. Trades clustered by street—hence the many modern thoroughfares still named for butchers, bakers, or tanners—while the guilds supervised production, fixed prices, regulated training, and ensured that economic freedom remained carefully managed.
Paris was effectively three cities in one: the Île de la Cité, with its royal palace and the rising bulk of Notre-Dame; the Left Bank, dominated by the university; and the Right Bank, crowded with merchants and the port. Around 1200, Philip Augustus drew a line around this world with a defensive wall. London, on the eve of the Black Death, held perhaps 80,000 inhabitants—a large town by contemporary standards, if modest by ours. A Cambridge project, mining coroners’ records, has mapped murders in fourteenth-century London and uncovered a homicide rate far beyond anything typical today. Knives were common, tempers short, and many killings stemmed from brawls in the streets, especially in markets or on holidays meant for rest. Even so, these teeming towns were exceptions: roughly 90% of Europeans lived in the countryside. Peasants clustered in villages ringed by open fields, housed in timber longhouses where people and animals sometimes shared the same roof. Archaeology now suggests these dwellings, long dismissed as miserable hovels, were sturdier and more carefully built than earlier historians preferred to imagine.
City houses were typically timber-framed, packed with wattle-and-daub walls that cracked and crumbled with the seasons. A shop or workshop filled the ground floor, while above, the family, apprentices, and servants all slept and worked on top of one another, and privacy was a luxury no one thought to expect. Fire was an ever-present threat; London finally banned thatched roofs after a blaze in 1212, a late concession to common sense. By modern standards, hygiene was poor, but not quite the medieval horror story of popular imagination. Waste was tipped into cesspits or straight into the street, pigs and other animals wandered wherever they liked, and water came from wells, rivers, and public fountains whose cleanliness depended on everyone and belonged to no one. Many towns maintained public bathhouses, a habit that faded by the 16th century under the twin suspicions of disease and prostitution. In such crowded conditions, epidemic disease was ruthless: the Black Death (1347–1351) wiped out between a third and a half of Europe’s population. Diet, like everything else, followed social rank. For the poor, daily fare meant bread, pottage—a thick mix of grains and vegetables—and ale. Meat, imported spices, and fine white bread signaled wealth, while the Church’s many fasting days turned fish into both a religious duty and a profitable necessity.
Sexual life unfolded in cramped dwellings and shared beds, where privacy was a luxury few could afford. The Church laid down rules about when and how spouses might have intercourse, banning it on a long list of feast days and insisting that its proper end was reproduction. Yet many towns quietly tolerated, or even officially licensed, brothels, while bathhouses were widely recognized as venues for sexual encounters. The familiar gap between proclaimed morality and common practice is written just as clearly in these arrangements as in the erotic scenes carved on Romanesque churches.
The Piazza del Campo in Siena is among the clearest illustrations of civic space in the medieval city. Its shell-shaped pavement tilts down toward the Palazzo Pubblico and the soaring Torre del Mangia, a deliberate stage for municipal power. The square’s surface is cut into nine segments, a permanent tribute to the Government of the Nine, the merchant oligarchy that directed the city from 1287 to 1355. In contrast to cathedral plazas, this was a lay arena for markets, festivals, proclamations, and the Palio horse race. Here the commune displayed its pride and its experiment in self-rule, a form of authority that answered neither to the feudal lord in his fortress nor to the bishop in his cathedral—though it proved no less concerned with spectacle and control.aerial views ** ,
London ** , English medieval towns **,
Paris ** ,
Streets of Medieval Europe ** ,
medieval housing
Farms ** ,
Hygiene
Feeding
Sexuality and architecture/rooms / public spaces/eroticism or reproduction **
Siena square
Privite life in the Middle Ages
Private life in the Middle Ages was far less private than ours. The household (familia) usually extended beyond parents and children to servants and apprentices, all sharing the same domestic orbit. Many children left home between the ages of 7 and 14 to serve, learn a trade, or, in the case of nobles, to be brought up in another lord’s household. Death, meanwhile, was a routine presence. Perhaps a third or more of children died before reaching adulthood, childbirth was among the chief hazards for women, and widows and widowers commonly remarried within months. Among the nobility, marriage functioned as an alliance of land and lineage negotiated by families, sometimes when the bride and groom were still children. The Church, ever ready to legitimize the arrangement, fixed the minimum age at 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Most peasants and townspeople in northwestern Europe, by contrast, married in their early or mid-twenties, with rather less ceremony but not necessarily more freedom.
Paradoxically, it was the Church that turned the couple’s mutual consent into the core of marriage. From the 12th century on, a simple exchange of present-tense vows («I take you as my wife») counted as a valid union, even with no priest or witnesses in sight. Predictably, this generated a flourishing crop of clandestine marriages and legal disputes, until the Council of Trent in 1563 decided that a priest and witnesses were suddenly indispensable. Public weddings typically took place at the church door, then moved on to a feast and a «bedding ceremony,» where the priest blessed the marriage bed and the guests ceremoniously escorted the couple to it. Consummation had legal weight: impotence could nullify a marriage, and church courts occasionally ordered examinations to verify it. There was no divorce, of course, but powerful families could still undo unions by conveniently uncovering some distant kinship between the spouses.
The Church allowed sex only within marriage and for the purpose of reproduction, banning it on Sundays, feast days, during Lent and Advent, and during menstruation and pregnancy. In theory, this left surprisingly few permissible days in the year. Yet each spouse still owed the other the “marital debt,” the obligation to have sex upon request. In contrast to later Victorian ideas, medieval thinkers largely regarded women as the more lustful sex. Drawing on ancient medicine, many also held that a woman had to experience pleasure in order to conceive—a belief conveniently used to question women who became pregnant after rape. Adultery operated under a double standard: women faced harsher penalties, often including public humiliation. Nobles, meanwhile, frequently maintained mistresses in full view and even recognized their illegitimate offspring; William the Conqueror himself bore the nickname “William the Bastard.” Courtly love poetry celebrated passion outside marriage, while prostitution was treated as a “necessary evil,” with many towns directly managing or licensing brothels. Priests commonly lived with concubines despite reform movements that mandated celibacy, and sodomy was singled out for especially severe condemnation, up to and including the death penalty.
Beds ranked among a family’s most prized possessions and regularly appeared in wills. They were rarely slept in alone: husbands and wives shared with their children, servants shared with one another, and travelers shared with strangers in inns. The wealthy slept in curtained beds that offered warmth and a token of privacy, while the poor lay on straw pallets. Sleeping naked was ordinary rather than scandalous. Historians also note that many people slept in two distinct phases—a “first sleep” and a “second sleep”—with a wakeful interval in between devoted to prayer, conversation, or sex.
Medieval people were not the unwashed caricatures of modern imagination, but their standards of cleanliness followed a different logic. Hands and faces were rinsed daily, especially before eating, since meals were taken with the fingers from shared bowls. Immersive baths were rarer and often reserved for public bathhouses. Changing linen undergarments was assumed to draw dirt and sweat away from the body. Lice were widespread, and picking them off one another was a routine, even gently intimate, activity. Aromatic herbs were strewn over floors to soften the stench, and teeth were wiped with cloth, salt, or herbs rather than brushed.
Most people ate twice a day, with the main meal at noon. Bread formed the core of their diet, and ale was a daily drink for every age, valued as much for its calories as for its taste. Much of this was «small ale,» low in alcohol but safely drinkable. Church rules barred meat on a large share of the calendar, so fish filled in the gaps. Spices served as discreet markers of wealth, while hunger reliably returned with each failed harvest. At table there were no personal plates or forks: people relied on their own knife, their fingers, and slabs of stale bread known as «trenchers» as dishes, and they calmly shared cups with whoever sat nearby.
Medicine operated under the theory of the four humors drawn from Hippocrates and Galen: illness arose from an imbalance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The prescribed remedies were bloodletting, purges, and diet, often scheduled in consultation with the stars. Physicians diagnosed patients by scrutinizing their urine, while barber-surgeons extracted teeth, set broken bones, and bled patients, and midwives oversaw childbirth. Universities such as Salerno and Montpellier taught a learned medicine that relied in part on Arabic authorities like Avicenna. For most people, however, healing also meant prayer, relics, pilgrimages to saints, and herbal concoctions passed down through practice. Hospitals functioned as religious charities caring for the poor, pilgrims, and the dying, not as institutions primarily designed to cure disease. Disease itself was attributed to “bad air” (miasma) or divine punishment, and lepers were pushed to the margins in settlements outside the towns. Life expectancy at birth hovered around 30, largely because so many children died; an adult who survived those early years, however, could reasonably hope to reach their 50s or 60s.
Deja un comentario